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Curried Eggs

A sauce of butter, flour, onion, curry powder, milk, and cream served over sliced hard‑cooked eggs on toasted Shredded Wheat biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Curried Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove shells from the eggs and cut them into slices.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, blend together the scraped onion, butter, flour, and curry powder, and cook until light brown.

  2. Slowly pour in the hot milk and cream, stirring continuously.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and cook until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Add the sliced eggs and heat through.

  2. Serve the curried eggs on toasted halves of Shredded Wheat Biscuit, pouring the sauce over them.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hard cooked eggs
Provide the main body of the dish, holding their shape as sliced pieces in the sauce.
Butter
Carries the curry flavour and gives the sauce richness when cooked with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it cooks with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Thin cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.
Curry powder
Gives the sauce its characteristic spiced aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Blending the roux and adding the hot liquid. Cooking the flour and butter until light brown removes raw starch taste, and stirring while slowly adding the liquid prevents lumps so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper, wheat):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper, wheat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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